Biden and Democrats make the rational choice

They're probably still underdogs against Trump, but Biden dropping out improves their odds.

Undoubtedly the biggest mistake of my forecasting career was insisting, until relatively late in the race, that Donald Trump wouldn’t win the 2016 Republican nomination for president. I was getting worried that I’d made a similar mistake in my prediction that Joe Biden would eventually exit the 2024 race — something he was insistent he wouldn’t do until he announced his decision to step aside at 1:46 p.m. today.

My baseline view of politics — what contributed to that bad prediction about Trump — is that political parties engage in something roughly resembling game-theory optimal behavior and undertake reasonably rational strategies in an effort to win elections and fulfill their other objectives. And I didn’t think Trump was a very rational choice for Republicans. I thought he’d have lower chances against Hillary Clinton than another Republican and also that, if elected, he’d undermine many of the Republican Party’s traditional goals in foreign policy and other areas.

Well, what do I know? Maybe Trump wasn’t such a bad candidate: he did beat Clinton, after all, although she was such a weak candidate that most other Republicans would probably have won also. And Trump was able to do the basic blocking-and-tackling on the issues the GOP cares the most about, like lowering taxes and appointing conservative Supreme Court justices. Now, Trump was a one-termer, and contributed to poor GOP midterms in 2018 and 2022, so the jury is still out on whether this was a good bet for Republicans: the verdict will probably depend on whether he’s able to regain the presidency in November. And that’s to say nothing of what Trump will mean for the long-term legacy of the Republican Party, or for the country.

As compared to Republicans’ decision about what to do about Trump, I thought Democrats had more agency about Biden following his disastrous debate. Unlike Republicans in 2016, Democrats hadn’t even bothered to hold a competitive primary — if they had, Biden’s flaws might have been even evident earlier — so the will-of-the-voters argument was weak. And unlike Trump in October 2016 following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape — after which some Republicans called on him to drop out — Biden wasn’t even the Democratic nominee yet since the party convention hadn’t been held. And Biden has always been a loyal Democrat who got a huge boost from the party establishment in wrapping up the nomination in 2020 — not someone who gave his party the middle finger.

It’s worth remembering that a lot had to break right for Trump to win in 2016. Without the Comey letter, Clinton would probably have held on. Then there was a polling error in Trump’s favor, and he won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote — whereas Biden is at an Electoral College disadvantage.

So nothing was for sure — but Biden was probably going to lose, and there was an increasing chance he’d lose badly. In what will be the final run of the Trump vs. Biden version of our model, Biden had a 27 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. But that was probably overstating his chances:

• Biden’s fundraising was drying up;

• Every other public appearances was a disaster; 

• Many prominent Democrats had called on him to exit the race or shared damaging stories about him;

• A majority of Democratic voters also wanted Biden to leave — which wasn’t true for Trump in 2016 and could have produced epic problems in terms of voter enthusiasm;

• Many White House staff and prominent Biden supporters had begun to lie to people and lie to themselves about the polling and how feasible it was to prop up Biden’s candidacy; 

• And voters weren’t buying any of this, so Democrats risked damaging their credibility — and further downballot losses — by pretending it was a good idea for Biden to run for another term until he was 86.

This is why I was literally willing to put my money where my mouth was when it came to Biden. A 27 percent isn’t high to begin with, but I figured his real chances were about half that — perhaps 10 to 15 percent — if he remained in the race.

Of course, it’s one thing to say political parties act rationally — but the “Democratic Party” is an abstraction. The United States isn’t a parliamentary system where a leader is out if he fails to maintain the confidence of party members. If Biden had simply refused to exit the stage, it would have been difficult to replace him — although by no means impossible under party rules. Still, as I’ve argued, remaining in the race would have been an irrational decision for Biden, too — probably resulting in a loss to Trump and severely tarnishing what could otherwise have been a pretty good legacy.

Unlike some commentators I respect, I’m not inclined to shower Biden with praise after his decision today. Instead, I’m more ambivalent. I do give him credit for leaving now instead of prolonging the agony further — I’d figured we were in for a really ugly week for Democratic Party, and today was about the last possible moment at which he could have exited with most of his dignity intact. However, as someone who was early on the Biden skepticism beat, I think Biden should have stepped aside many months ago when there still would have been time to have some semblance of a competitive primary. I think the people who thought it was a good idea to run this version of Biden for another term — from family members like Hunter Biden to strategists like Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mike Donilon and Ron Klain — should be regarded with skepticism and shouldn’t come within 100 miles of the war room of Kamala Harris or whomever else the Democratic nominee turns out to be.

And it probably will be Harris, who already has the support of many important factions of the Democratic Party — including, importantly, Biden, whose campaign was responsible for picking the large majority of DNC delegates. There’s no obvious choice apart from Harris, no alternative who had gotten off to any sort of a running start — if someone else had wanted the nomination, they probably should have made that clear as soon as the debate was over.

I extensively covered the case for and against Harris last week. I certainly think she’ll have better chances than Biden. For what it’s worth, I’m going to proceed cautiously before making any sort of official forecast of her chances; we’ll probably wait 7-10 days to turn the model back on and see what the polls say now that she’s an actual candidate instead of a hypothetical one.

As much as I endorse the idea of a “mini-primary” in principle, it might be too difficult to pull off under the circumstances. But what Democrats really deserved as a real primary. Might Harris prove to be a better candidate than she was in 2020? Perhaps, but a primary would have been a good test of that. Would a candidate like Gretchen Whitmer have been as good on the campaign trail as she appeared to be on paper? We’d get to see that, too. The value of a primary is in the optionality it provides and in the additional information it reveals, since a primary campaign is a reasonably good simulation of a general election.

Under these less-than-ideal circumstances, I figure that Harris is an underdog — though we’ll see what the model says. And if she loses, we’ll probably get some Biden dead-enders resurfacing to say that Democrats made the wrong choice. But if the election is as important as Democrats say it is, they have to do what they can to maximize their chances, even if they’re below 50 percent. Facing a difficult position, party leaders like Nancy Pelosi played their hand well, ignoring the White House’s BS and gradually ramping up the pressure on Biden and eventually getting him to quit without having to go too nuclear. At the very least, they’ve reduced the downside risk of the bottom truly falling out of the campaign — say, because of another disaster in the September debate — and landslide Republican margins in the House and Senate. We’ve learned a lot in the past few weeks about who the selfish and irrational actors are within the Democratic Party. But at least this time, cooler and saner heads prevailed.